Learn more about The Secret Agent:

Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law. (from the first line)

From the Publisher:The Secret Agent is set in the seedy world of Adolf Verloc, a storekeeper and double agent in late-Victorian London who pretends to sympathize with a group of international anarchists but reports on their activities to both the Russian embassy and the British government. As he is drawn further into a terrorist bombing plot, his family also becomes involved, with devastating consequences. Based on a real-life failed anarchist plot, The Secret Agent is both intimately engaged with its historical moment and profoundly relevant today.This new Broadview Edition helps to recreate the historical context that informed Conrad's preoccupations with global terrorism, human degeneration, the relativity of time, and the position of women.

Author Bio

Joseph Conrad

Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzenioski, son of Polish nationalists who died in exile for their political activities, was raised by relatives in various parts of Eastern Europe. He went to sea at 16, and spent 20 years at sea, working first on French merchant ships in the West Indies, then on English ships, where he learned the language and traveled to Latin America and Africa. He drew on these experiences for much of his fiction; in 1890 he was the commander of a ship that traveled up the Congo River, the inspiration for HEART OF DARKNESS. He began writing in 1892, on a voyage from England to Australia, and in 1895 he left the British merchant service to become a full-time writer. He settled in London and married an Englishwoman. Although English was not his native language, he is renowned for the subtlety and descriptiveness of his prose--despite the fact that he spoke the language all his life with a heavy accent. His model for the writing of fiction was Henry James, whom he addressed as "cher ma?tre." Conrad died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 67. His epitaph, taken from Spenser's THE FAERIE QUEENE, reads: "Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, /Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please."

Praise

"A brilliant book...one of the greatest works of modern irony, a form of very justified address to the modern world." - Malcolm Bradbury

Washington Post Book World"[H]as the thrills of a John le Carre or one of Graham Greene's sinister entertainments, but Conrad did it first." - Jennifer Howard 02/21/1999